ASCD Inservice

Hypotheses: They're Not Just for Science Anymore

Are you saying to yourself, "What on earth does a hypothesis have to do with English?" Or perhaps, "Hypotheses? You're kidding me. I need my kids to know the causes of the Civil War first." Read on, colleagues. Marzano [Chapter Four, Art & Science of Teaching] may surprise you. 

Summary:

You've set learning goals with your kids, presented the related knowledge, and worked with that knowledge. Hypothesis-generating and testing are the next essential step. There are four types of this kind of higher level work: experimental inquiry, problem solving, decision making, and investigation.

Stuck in My Head:

There's an innocent statement on the top of page 97 that goes like this: "Of course, students will be better able to address these questions if they have had some previous experience with experimental inquiry, problem-solving, decision-making, and investigation tasks designed by the teacher." My response, unfair as it is, goes like this: "And where is this going to happen, Dr. Marzano? Atlantis?"

It's not Dr. Marzano's job in this book to deconstruct school systems, but simply to suggest good teaching. I get that. Yet of all the chapters I have read so far, this is the one that strikes me as the most important—and the most difficult to implement. Why? Because aside from some very limited and teacher-directed applications in the sciences, hardly anyone teaches like this. Despite all our buzzwords like "differentiation", "higher-level thinking," and "student-centered learning," in practice, the majority of our educational culture is still crawling at a painfully slow pace away from the "banking" model of school: kids heads are empty, and we need to fill them.

Parental Help with Goals Gets the Grades

In a new meta-analysis on parental involvement, researchers found the highest positive effect on student achievement among middle schoolers whose parents engaged them in goal setting that valued education as integral to future successes.

Though middle school is often marked by declining interest in academics in favor of social pursuits, it's also the time when adolescents begin to internalize personal goals. Parental guidance on goal setting and learning or studying strategies tied to achieving those goals goes a long way for students at this age. 

Parental involvement with homework had less of a clear connection to academic gains--some students found parents helpful, while others found their parents' help confusing or over-bearing.  

Chapter 9 of the new ASCD book, Changing the Way You Teach, Improving the Way Students Learn (Martin-Kniep, Picone-Zocchia) gets into goal setting and planning as part of growing strategic learners. Here's an excerpt:

Practice, Practice, Practice (Or: Homework, Homework, Homework?)

Hang onto your hats, folks. If you’re mired in the homework/no homework debate, read on for some very interesting commentary from Dr. Marzano in Chapter Three of The Art & Science of Teaching.

Summary

It is essential for students to not merely be exposed to new knowledge, but actively and authentically work with the knowledge. Not every kind of work fits every kind of knowledge, however.

When teaching procedural skills (how to accomplish something step by step), you also need to allow students to practice those skills. This practice should be frequent and simple at first, giving way to more complex activities. Importantly, students should reflect consistently on their own use of the procedures and come to an understanding that works for them individually: changing, adding, or deleting steps as necessary.

When teaching declarative knowledge (concepts or ideas), you need to create activities that allow students to review and revise. By making active corrections, connections, and reflections, students incorporate their knowledge into their long-term memories, like pressing pieces of pottery into a mosaic. There are seven pages at the end of this chapter that give some solid practical tools for working with declarative knowledge in class.

Stuck in My Head

By far the most interesting writing in this chapter to me is Marzano’s position on—you guessed it—homework. And serendipity strikes! As I write, commenters are raging over this Inservice post on "The Homework Lady," Cathy Vatterott.(Full disclosure: I attended Homework Lady’s workshop at ASCD's 2008 Annual Conference and loved it.)

For those of you out there spurning Homework Lady's seemingly anti-homework policies, it's worth mentioning here that Marzano's own homework recommendations echo Vatterott’s nearly point for point. See below for a list.

Planning the Possible: How Schools Can Use Stimulus Dollars for Lasting Impact

This week, ASCD releases its report, "Planning the Possible: How Schools Can Use Stimulus Dollars for Lasting Impact". The report synthesizes data and policy recommendations on the ARRA funding, and answers questions like

• How is the stimulus funding being distributed over the five different government programs? (Title I, IDEA, Innovation fund, Ed Tech, SFSF)
• For each distribution, what are the potential uses for funds?
• How do the states match up on funding levels?
• What are the stipulations about how funds can't be used?
• What are the deadlines for committing funds?
• Why invest in professional development, and what are the features of effective PD?

"Planning the Possible" lays out the ARRA funding situation in clear terms, and identifies a range of ASCD programs, products, and services engineered to provide sustained, capacity-building professional development to elevate teacher effectiveness and improve student achievement.

The report is completely available online--check it out and let us know what you think. What's your district's PD area of focus or high need? What ARRA guidance hasn't been covered? How is your school or district already responding to the ARRA infusion? What future programming or services from ASCD would help your school or district's reform efforts?

Engaging Students in Learning

As many of you know, ASCD's Whole Child Initiative is based on the belief that students must be healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. Since we launched the Whole Child Web site just over two years ago, we have noticed the resources we've posted about engaging students have received the most traffic. We think this could be because most educators know that we need to engage students in learning, but they are having difficulty doing so in light of the mounting pressures of assessment and acocuntability.

To respond to this need, ASCD created a new e-book, Engaging the Whole Child: Reflections on Best Practices in Learning, Teaching, and Leadership, which is available for free download through May 6. The e-book includes a collection of articles from Educational Leadership by renowned authors such as Carol Ann Tomlinson, Richard Sagor, Nell Noddings, Thomas R. Guskey, and Allison Zmuda. The articles address how to inspire trust and confidence, deepen students' thinking, instill the desire to achieve, build on student interests, and more.

How do you engage students in learning? Share your thoughts here.

Struggling Teachers: Boot or Retrain?

In the April issue of Education Update, the article "Supporting Struggling Teachers" asks whether struggling teachers should get the boot or be retrained. Robyn Jackson, author of Never Work Harder Than Your Students and Other Principles of Great Teaching, says, "Teachers don't get have the option of getting rid of 'bad' kids, so why is our only solution to get rid of 'bad' teachers?" Some education experts and administrators say professional development, coaching, and mentoring can give underperforming teachers the tools they need to improve.

What do you think—should they stay, or should they go? How can you help teachers who struggle in the classroom?

[Bonus: Check out this new report (PDF) from the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future on how best to retain inexperienced new teachers with learning teams.]

Chapter 2: The Art & Science of Teaching

Summary

After identifying key learning goals, the teacher must then figure out the activities or network of activities—what Marzano calls critical input experiences—students need to achieve those goals. Marzano suggests the general framework of the following:

• previewing;

• division of students into groups;

• chunking information in ways that require students to describe, discuss, and make predictions;

• asking inferential questions;

• recording information in various forms of notes; and

• reflecting on the learning.

Stuck in My Head: The Power of Narrative

Figure 2.1 on page 32 says it all, doesn't it?

Effects of Different Types of Learning Experiences in Nuthall's Research

Type of Experience	Percent of Information Recalled One Year After Completion of Unit
Visual Instruction	77
Dramatic Instruction	57
Verbal Instruction	53
Source: Data from Nuthall, 1999; Nuthall & Alton-Lee, 1995.

I've got a thing for narrative as an English teacher, of course, and so this tidbit isn’t enough for me. Check out Daniel Willingham's column on the neuroscience behind the power of narrative. I give this link to almost everyone I talk to eventually—no kidding. I'm also kicking around researching something along these lines for a doctorate someday.

Playing It Out

I'd like to focus here on a central concept of the chapter: group work.

Classroom Instruction That Works for the 21st Century Learner

ASCD's best-selling book Classroom Instruction That Works and it's nine core instructional strategies have influenced instruction around the world and spawned spin-offs focusing on assessment and grading, classroom management, English language learners, and technology.  

If you could help rewrite Classroom Instruction That Works today, what would you change?

Would you include more guidance for working with different learning styles and types of learners? How administrators can use CITW? Give more attention to 21st century learning skills like communication, collaboration, and innovation? Or . . . ?

If you're using CITW, let us know what you think. And if you've blogged on CITW or have a Web site you rely on for practical information for using the CITW framework, send us the link!

Marzano: "I Can Think of No Strategy Every Teacher Should Use"

This post is Bob Marzano's response to our teacher-blogger Dina Strasser's analysis of Chapter One of Marzano's The Art and Science of Teaching.

My overarching comment is that the title "art and science of teaching" is meant to convey the message that research only gets you so far and then teachers' reasoned adaptations must take over. All research is equivocal at least to some extent, and its application to new situations must be discussed and debated.

Regarding the issue of rewards, that's a tough one. People seem to be lined up strongly on one side or the other of the issue. On page 16 of the book, I said, "It is safe to say, however, that when used appropriately verbal rewards and perhaps also tangible rewards can positively affect student achievement," which I believe is a fair and accurate interpretation of the research. My intent wasn't to say that all teachers should use rewards. However, it was to say that it's not prudent to ban them either. I included the long quote by Deci, Ryan, and Koestner, however, to allow people to read the concerns of the major researchers in the field.

On the issue of setting goals and tracking student progress, I think the research is less equivocal. I find it hard to make a case that it's not a practice that all teachers should consider. We have done quite a few experimental/control studies on this practice and have received very good results. These studies will be posted on a new Web site going up in a few weeks; I'll provide a link soon.

Chapter One: The Art and Science of Teaching

As I sit down to write this first substantive post, I have to admit I'm feeling a little trepidation . . . as if I'm having a peer observation in all of my classes! But I am also enjoying the challenge of being asked to articulate my practice decisions to a knowledgeable audience.

Chapter Summary

Chapter One focuses on the bedrock of teaching: what do kids need to learn, and how do you know they've learned it? Marzano suggests articulating one or two learning goals—not activities—per unit of study; writing a scale or rubric for assessing whether the goals have been achieved; having kids share in the process of forming goals; formally tracking student progress on those goals; and acknowledging student success in that progress.

I'll also make an overarching remark here that for the practitioner who is short on time, essential reading is the Action Steps provided at the end of each chapter (Chapter One's Steps is on page 17). Try reading these first, and then going backwards in the chapter to pinpoint the research discussions for the action steps that interest you—or even disappoint you.

Why? I say this not as a Marzanoetic, but rather because I have rarely found a book that puts its supporting research front and center for you to evaluate, instead of burying it in footnotes for you to sift through bemusedly. (And believe me, I'm a geek. I've done this.) This is the great benefit of A&S. Use it. Because in the end, it doesn't matter whether you agree with its conclusions or not, so long as you can do so well.      

What Makes a Great Teacher?

ASCD author Robyn Jackson chatted with Teacher Magazine's online editor Elizabeth Rich last Friday about the practical magic behind great teaching. Jackson discussed her new ASCD book, Never Work Harder Than Your Students and Other Principles of Great Teaching, and answered questions from readers about topics such as performance pay, teacher burnout, and testing.

"I would love to see the way that we develop teachers to focus more on what it means to teach and how students learn and the principles of effective instruction, rather than just the methods . . . I think testing has taken on too great a focus not just in education schools, but in our national conversation about education. It has become such a focus that we often forget about the human side of education and just look at the numbers."

Do you know what makes a great teacher? Join the discussion!

Intro to a Teacher's Take on The Art & Science of Teaching

This post is teacher and blogger Dina Strasser's first in a series on Marzano's The Art and Science of Teaching. Read Marzano's response here.

Robert Marzano is a guru, as I'm sure most of the readership knows. His name is consistently the only one I can throw out at educator-type cocktail parties and have teachers from all walks of the profession say, "Oh, yeah, HIM." So you can imagine my delight and sense of honor at being asked to chronicle my ongoing tango with his latest book, The Art and Science of Teaching (2007). 

I first encountered Dr. Marzano directly at his 2008 ASCD Annual Conference in New Orleans keynote. I fell for his presence; not only because he backs up every single assertion he makes with gobs of quantitative research, but because he is as unsparingly and honestly critical of his own teaching as of anyone else's; indeed A & S is essentially a revisiting (and occasional revision) of the principles he discusses in his earlier work Classroom Instruction That Works (2001). This is not something that a teacher may necessarily know from reading A & S, but it may be the most important thing to know about it, ironically. Dr. Marzano is not some education "expert" eating sugar plums in the ivory tower. I trust him. You should too.

The other assertion I need to make right off the bat is about where I am professionally myself: in my tenth year of teaching, but only my second in a new subject area (middle school English/Language Arts). I tell you this because I feel it encapsulates the weird, but useful, universe in which I live at the moment. I am both experienced and green; understanding keenly what I need to do to be an effective educator, and still struggling mightily to do it. In other words, if you're a teacher, I am probably just like you in one way or another. I hope you can trust me as well.

Marzano Responds to "A Teacher's Take on The Art & Science of Teaching (part 1)"

This post is Robert Marzano's response to A Teacher's Take on The Art & Science of Teaching (pt. 1).

First, let me state that I'm honored Dina would be interested enough in The Art and Science of Teaching to blog about it. In the beginning, I'd like to make a few points. First, although I appreciate Dina's intent in the use of the word "guru," I'm anything but that. We all have our place in the grand scheme of K-12 education in the U.S. There are people who are building administrators, central office administrators, curriculum developers, state level administrators. There are also people like myself who try to translate research and theory into practical tools and ideas for practitioners. However, all of us listed so far are on the periphery. The place where the rubber meets the road is the classroom, and the people who are at that critical point of contact with students are teachers.

What If We Also Set Up Teachers for Success?

Post submitted by ASCD author Robyn R. Jackson, author of Never Work Harder Than Your Students and Other Principles of Great Teaching.

Marc Fisher's recent Washington Post two-part series (here and here) on teacher quality and school improvement struggles in the District of Columbia has caused me to wonder: What would we say of a teacher who told her students that they were performing terribly but did not provide them with the support and structure they needed to improve? How would we react if that teacher put her lowest-performing students on a 90-day instructional plan, and if they did not improve, expelled them? What if that teacher then replaced those students with a new crop of students but treated them the exact same way?

What would happen, in other words, if we treated our students the way that we often treat teachers?

How Are You Creating Global Classrooms?

The article "Creating Global Classrooms," in the January issue of Education Update, discusses some of the innovative, interactive projects connecting students around the world. Tech-savvy educators collaborate across continents using electronic portals such as ePals and iEARN to develop online projects that infuse academic lessons with a global perspective. Using online forums, Webcams, blogs, and other interactive tools, young people can participate in exciting cultural exchanges and learn from one another. 
 
How are you using technology to create globally competent students? What kind of cross-cultural education projects are you doing in your classroom?

Never Work Harder Than Your Students

In her new ASCD book, Never Work Harder Than Your Students and Other Principles of Great Teaching, educator Robyn R. Jackson makes a bold assertion: Any teacher can become a master teacher with the right kind of practice. The book makes the case that high-quality teachers concentrate on seven essential principles of effective teaching before implementing specific classroom strategies. One of Jackson's seven principles is that teachers should "never work harder than your students."

"The starting point comes when teachers embrace the messiness that is learning," says Jackson. "We have sanitized learning; we want to make it so clean. Everything in a classroom has to go just like we planned it. But if you leave spaces [in lesson planning] for kids to occupy, that's when they'll start to take control. You're creating situations where the kids have to do the work. We think kids are lazy, but kids want to work. They'll work in ways that are authentic to what they need."

Jackson, a former National Board–certified teacher and middle school administrator, not only shares how she learned from her mistakes but also explains how other teachers helped her think and act like a master teacher. Watch Jackson talk about her book on ASCD Talks With an Author.

How do you embrace the messiness of learning in your classroom?

Reading First or Worst?

In the December Education Update, "Reading First: Sustaining Success in Difficult Times" examines the debate over the impact of the $6 billion Reading First program on primary grades literacy.

Some experts say Reading First is the best federal effort to date to shore up early literacy skills, while a recent Department of Education research report says it improved reading instruction and decoding skills but made no difference in reading comprehension scores of elementary school kids.

Teachers, specialists, and administrators with firsthand knowledge of how Reading First has impacted your students and school literacy efforts, has this federal program delivered on its promise to improve student literacy?

Discipline Experts Advise on Keeping Your Cool

How do you respond when a student says something like, "This class sucks"? Brian Mendler, one of the three authors of the third edition of Discipline with Dignity, suggests listening, acknowledging, agreeing, deferring, and then walking away.

"Agreeing is the hardest part," says Mendler. But if you can redirect a disruptive student by saying "I hear you and you might be right, but now's not the time to talk about it," and then move on with what you were originally doing, Mendler believes you have a powerful tool for defusing a common classroom frustration. By offering to hear a student's recommendations for improving the class at a later time, you give students an outlet for articulating their needs but also weed out the kids who just want to complain and have no intentions of constructive dialogue.

If a kid does take time out of their day to meet with you about how the class could be improved, this is actually a good thing, says Mendler. It shows they care about the class and are invested in making it better.

We talked with authors Rick Curwin and Brian Mendler about the latest edition of Discipline with Dignity and found out how the classroom management landscape has changed and how teachers are keeping their cool with challenging students and parents.

Go to the ASCD Talks With an Author page to hear this and other author interviews.

New Report: Measuring Skills for the 21st Century

This week, Education Sector released the report Measuring Skills for the 21st Century and hosted an online discussion about 21st century learning. In that discussion, Judith Goodrich from Augusta Lewis Troup School asked:

Schools are faced with the pressure of standardized tests and the impact of making annual yearly progress. Schools that are struggling have little time in a rigid schedule to integrate 21st century skills. How do we turn the tide on a practical level in our classrooms—is cooperative/collaborative learning the place to start?

Among the responses from the panel of experts, Eva Baker from CRESST UCLA responds, "Nope, changing the standards and assessments is the place to start."

In the upcoming January 2009 issue of Education Update, we sit down with the executive director of West Virginia's Teach 21 project, a statewide initiative to align teaching, standards, and assessments with 21st century skills and learning, and examine how one state is "turning the tide on a practical level."

What are your questions about teaching and assessing for 21st century skills?

ASCD Express Calls for Submissions

ASCD Express is looking for short, 600–1,000-word essays on the theme of "Collaboration to Support Instruction." The theme description is below, and guidelines for submissions are here. Send us your submissions by Tuesday, November 11.

When teachers can rely on instructional leaders in the school for support and guidance, they can improve their classroom practice significantly. But how should such collegial relationships be structured for professional success, which means maximum influence on student learning? This issue will look at collaborative models that encourage mutual sharing of classroom practice and insight among educators with different levels of experience in an atmosphere of trust.